Creative design talks directly to people’s heart. Creative designers must be equipped with software tools that enable them to easily craft and adjust the product's emotional content through their designs,while collaborating with engineering to ensure proper coverage of product functional scope.

Successful products in the market are usually those with designs that elicit positive emotional response from their consumers. CATIA is at the service of creative designers and their creativity. Whether starting ideation in 3D from scratch or from 2D sketches, industrial designers can manipulate shapes with unrivaled freedom and take advantage of a true creativity accelerator to explore more ideas in the early conceptual phase. CATIA fully addresses the Automotive Class-A process with a solution for surface refinement that integrates industry leading ICEM surfacing technologies. By combining the V6 technology strengths, which include knowledge capture-and-reuse paradigm, it delivers a powerful and intuitive suite of tools for modeling, analyzing and visualizing aesthetic and ergonomic shapes for the highest Class-A surface quality.

CATIA Reverse Engineering

The most complete reverse engineering solution to speed-up the early phase of product design

The use of numerous systems to develop digital products from physical prototypes is complex and costly, leading to delays in product development. Companies require intuitive environments that are ergonomic and fully-integrated to ensure their investment pays off quickly.

CATIA Reverse Engineering makes it possible to quickly capture and enhance physical prototype shapes, making the 3D virtual model the design reference. It also provides powerful technologies embedded within CATIA that allow the easy manipulation of clouds of points or meshes, while quickly transforming them into high-end 3D surface shapes.

Benefit from full integration within the CATIA design environment

Learn and use the reverse engineering environment easily

Experience extended compatibility with standard data formats

Use multiple strategies for surface reconstruction

Manage large volumes of data

Reduce project costs and streamline design iterations

Import and export clouds of points in various standard formats

The user can import almost all native measuring machines’ data. Data can be of different types, for example, meshes, grids, scans, and clouds of points. Imported data can be of different formats, for example, standard formats (IGES, free ASCII, STL, etc.) or formats from native measuring machine makers, such as GOM, HYSCAN, KREON, STEINBICHLER, etc. The user can preview, scale, trim, or change the measuring units of the imported data.

Robust alignment and deviation checking for control processes

CATIA Reverse Engineering provides several robust strategies for the alignment of digitized data with other digitized data or in relation to CAD models. It also provides extensive and associative diagnosis commands such as:
Deviation checking between digitized data, surfaces or curves
Annotations and reporting on deviation checking
Connect checker between surfaces allows the visualization of eventual deviations during the joining of several surfaces in passage, tangency and curvature
Thanks to these alignment capabilities and diagnosis commands, CATIA Reverse Engineering covers control processes such as:
Alignment Control between digitized data
Deviation Control between a rebuilt CAD model and the master digitized model
Control of an object as manufactured and the CAD mock-up as designed

Smart and advanced tools to manipulate clouds of points and meshes

Thanks to several 2D and 3D computation methods, the user can create watertight meshes that can be:
Used in the CATIA V6 DMU product, rendering, etc.
Directly manufactured in CATIA V6 manufacturing product
Exported in STL format for rapid prototyping machines
CATIA Reverse Engineering also provides a set of smart and advanced edition tools to manage and improve clouds of points and meshes such as:
Working on sub-areas
Removing, cleaning, filtering, smoothing, hole filling and shape improvement
Mesh segmentation in pertinent surface domains

Surface creation

CATIA Reverse Engineering allows easy surface creation (mechanical shapes or free-form shapes) from digitized data. Several approaches to recover surfaces depending of the shape's type are available:
For free-form shapes by fitting on a domain delimited by N-sides 3D curves networks and constraints on boundaries
For mechanical shapes by identifying and preserving editable features (plane, cylinder, sphere, cone)
Recovering virtual sharp edges by extending and trimming primary surfaces
For sweeping surfaces using a loft command
Automatic surface creation from a mesh according to a given accuracy

Polygon modeler for virtual clay modeling

CATIA Reverse Engineering provides a set of intuitive polygonal modeling and sculpting tools that work like clay modeling. It is particularly well suited to shape designs when surfacing becomes complex.

Rapid prototyping

CATIA Reverse Engineering also covers the rapid prototyping process through surfaces and solid tessellation capabilities to get watertight meshes.